Fed ‘Third Mandate’ Forces Bond Traders to Rethink Age-Old Rules

For generations on Wall Street, it was a statement of fact: The Federal Reserve’s “dual mandate” of price stability and maximum employment governed how it set interest rates, invoked time and again from Alan Greenspan to Jerome Powell.

So when Donald Trump’s latest pick for Fed governor, Stephen Miran, cited a third mandate — that it must also pursue “moderate long-term interest rates” — chatter lit up on bond trading desks as analysts debated what it all meant.